Levels of Living | Page 5

one on the whole
bench-land. He then becomes an authority on cactus. If he can discover
a few foes on the horizon he is blind to a regiment of friends close at
hand.
But the seers, our poets and teachers, have a wider vision; they seek the
glory rather than the gloom and they tell us that every man has more
friends than foes. This is the song of those who told us long ago of
Providence, the one who backs a man up and fights on his side and
furnishes him in the hour of need. This is the song of Lowell, Tennyson,
Whittier, and Browning. Life is not a lone-handed fight against
unnumbered foes; it is not a losing fight to any who will fight it well.
Every force in this world works with the man who seeks the good. This
is a right world and only he who fights the right faces the
unconquerable. A man may meet rebuffs, battle's tides may sweep back
and forth, but in the end, as it has ever been in all the long story of
man's conflict with nature, so in the conflict with every other foe, he is
bound to win. This is as true in the individual life of every fighter as
nature and history show it to be in universal life.

On our side there is the great world of the unseen. Little do we know of
it, but still that little gives us confidence to believe it is peopled with
our allies. Our fairest hopes of good angels may be delusions as to
details, but they are essentially true, being born of an eternal verity.
The gospel of good hope declares there is One over all, the friend of all;
greater is He that is with you than any against you; greater is He than
your temptations, your adversaries, your difficulties, and your sorrows.
This was what the great Teacher came to tell men, that God was on
their side, seeking to help them, loving, caring, coöperating, leading
them into the life of victory over every enemy.
Let a man face life in this confidence and he is invincible. He goes
forth and an unseen army goes with him. He gains the seer's vision to
see even the plotting of the enemy and the forces that fight against him
all working for his good. From many combats he gains strength for the
decisive struggle. All things work together for good. He serves the right,
the truth, the things that are eternal; he fights for character, for
manhood, and the good; and the eternal forces that rule the universe
fight by his side. He beholds the hills full of the hosts of heaven;
though he has no time to enjoy the vision he knows they are there, his
allies, his assurance of ultimate victory.

THE UNSEEN HAND
The mightiest and the eternal forces fight ever on the side of the right.
True, things do not always look that way. Sometimes Napoleon's sneer
about God being on the side of the largest battalions seems to have
truth in it. But ere long we see the large battalions swept away before
the strange, unaccountable, and irresistible power of an insignificant
body having truth and God on its side.
The man who takes up the struggle for truth, who puts his hand to the
sword for the oppressed, for the right, finds himself holding a
two-handled weapon, and if he grasps firmly the one hilt it is as though
there were an omnipotent hand grasping the other. He who fights

worthily, in fitting battle, never fights alone.
It is not that some omnipotent person steps down from a throne in the
heavens and plunges into the battle; it is that every time a man steps out
for right and truth he places himself in accord with eternal spiritual
forces that give themselves to him and his work. It is not that God
comes to fight for a man so much as that a man finds himself fighting
beside God; entering this battle, he sees that where he thought none had
been serving heaven had long been waging the contest.
It is so easy, like old Elijah, to think that you alone are left to witness
for truth, to feel the loneliness of standing for things noble and worthy,
to become oppressed with the hopelessness of the minority in which
you find yourself. When real and concrete things press upon us and
their uproar is in our ears we become deaf and blind to the greater
forces that from the beginning of time have been working for the best.
Every great reform has looked like a losing movement; it has begun
with most insignificant minorities; it has met with violent and
well-organized opposition;